Nature Spirits + Devas

encountering beings of light

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When I was about six years old, I made what would turn out to be one of the most important decisions of my life.

It's hard to imagine that anything you do at such a young age could have incredibly far-reaching consequences. But looking back over the fifty-odd years since that moment, I see how a decision I made at six years old about how I would view the world would shape me in ways I could not imagine.

It was a crisp fall morning, a Saturday. It was early; I was standing in our driveway. The sun was behind me, rising over the woods across the street from our house; its early morning rays stretched across a clear blue autumn sky and lit the leaves of the tall, old oaks and maples behind our house. In my mind, a vision of beauty and wonder appeared. Elves painted the green leaves scarlet, gold, and russet in autumn.

Vintage illustrations, 1.The Painting of the Leaves, Lithograph 1954, 2. Millicent Sowerby, circa 1910, Elves Painting Berries, 3. Margaret Tarrant, from the book The Forest Fairies, circa 1918.

I was a rather precocious child. By five, I had deduced that Santa Claus wasn't "real," not real like Al, the mailman who brought letters to our house daily. By six years old, I was grappling with the ever-widening gap between what I experienced and knew as "real" and what the adults around me considered real. I blame going to school for this.

As a young child, I distinctly remember feeling that I belonged to some other world, a world that was here and not here at the same time.

My earliest memories are of perfect communication with plants, trees, and animals. I experienced a high degree of connection with what I would now describe as a living, vibrating net of pulsing energy of which everything was a part. I easily understood clover, violets, dandelions, ladybugs, squirrels, robins, tree roots, clouds, butterflies, and all manner of plant, animal, and mineral life. What I found more difficult were people, adults, and other children.

Returning to that bright autumn morning on the driveway, I remember very distinctly knowing that elves painting the leaves the colors of autumn wasn't "real" in the usual way. But, of course, in the world of school and everyone else, neither were Santa, the Easter Bunny, faeries, elves, dwarves, gnomes, or brownies. Yet, I knew we had a house brownie; I even named my first dog Brownie. At that moment, I acknowledged that those things weren't "real" in a certain way and according to some people, but I was going to believe they existed anyway because that is what I knew to be true.

You might think this was just a childish fantasy or a resistance to growing up, but it was much more than that. It was a recognition, a choice to trust in my experiences, and a decision not to shut that out. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made. It was wise beyond my years and continues to have repercussions to this day.

That decision kept open the lines of communication between me and the subtle realms. It allowed me to do things like intuitively understand poetry and art. It smoothed the path of spiritual development and honed my powers of empathy, insight, and intuition. It also kept me close to myth and other sources of the supernatural. Finally, that choice allowed me to retain something I would have lost to the onslaught of materialist-reductionism that dominated my schooling years and still primarily dominates our culture.

The Science Behind Nature Spirits

Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. This view is now undergoing a credibility crunch. The biggest problem of all for materialism is the existence of conscious-ness. Panpsychism provides a way forward. So does the recognition that minds are not confined to brains.

~ Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. Explore 2013; 9:211-218 & 2013 Elsevier Inc.

Panpsychism, namely the idea that even atoms and molecules have a primitive kind of mentality or experience. (The Greek word pan means everywhere, and psyche means soul or mind.) Panpsychism does not mean that atoms are conscious in the sense that we are, but only that some aspects of mentality or experience are present in the simplest physical systems. More complex forms of mind or experience emerge in more complex systems.

~Strawson G. Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism. J Conscious Stud. 2006;13:3–31

At six years old, I understood panpsychism; everything has a soul.

I arrived on earth with that knowledge firmly embedded. No amount of philosophical, scientific, or materialist arguments or shaming over the years has ever come close to undermining that for me.

My surety in that knowledge has recently flared again in bright flaming inner experience because of a few things.

First, it is spring, and after months of hibernation, I am outdoors again. Yesterday I planted a beautiful Lindera benzoin, aka Spicebush, which joins three others in a little grove I am creating.

Afterward, I walked into our woods and back to the pond. A yellow-rumped warbler, numerous red-winged blackbirds, a northern flicker, a great blue heron standing in her nest, half a dozen mallard ducks, painted turtles, great big lily pads, deep maroon-red still under the surface of the water, and a mourning cloak butterfly greeted me.

But more than any of those encounters, as wonderful as they were, there was something else—subtle energy. The earth and all her creatures are now awake, and I can detect their energy. I feel their aliveness and their consciousness. We communicate on a soul-to-soul frequency.

Our pond is part of an inland wetland system that sits between two small hills. One wooded hill is part of my backyard. We own the mid-section of the pond and some of the land on the opposite side of the water. My neighbors own other sections of the pond. When we moved here more than a decade ago, the pond was not a pond but an actual marshy wetland. Over time, beavers, rising water levels, the loss of trees from flooding, and other environmental factors created a proper pond. I watched in fascination as the habitat changed. However, not everyone in the neighborhood was happy about the change. Damage was intentionally inflicted, beavers killed, protests mounted, and legal action ensued. I was on the side of preservation and respect for the pond and its inhabitants. It was a stressful time, to say the least.

While I was passionate about the issue, I still needed to develop an actual relationship with the deva of the pond. Once I did, everything changed.

Pond Life, mixed media art journal, Jan Blencowe©2019

Protecting the Pond, mixed media art journal, Jan Blencowe©2019

Deva + Nature Spirits

Deva is an ancient Sanskrit word meaning "Being of Light." They range from... "the elements" right up through faerie or nature spirits to the great angelic beings that are most appropriately called "deva" - Beings of Light. Hence, in Western countries, deva is often referred to as the angelic kingdom, and its higher ranks are included in the major religions....we need to realize that deva is the kingdom of substance and form - the world of matter both solid and subtle.

~ Jacquelyn E. Lane, Deva, Our Relationship with the Subtle World

Here I must pause and say that "deva," like "chakra," is a Vedic concept. "Deva" and "chakra" have come into our lexicon because they give us language to describe something we know and experience but have no word for in English. Yet, how we understand deva is modified by our Western lens. I'm OK with this borrowing, expanding, and modifying because while Kipling may have declared that "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," the more I study mythology and language, I realize that Indo-European and even further back in time Proto-Indo-European the proposed "parent language" hints at a common ancestry and a gradual disbursement of religion, culture, and ideas that while changing drastically over time and geography maintains common roots between "East and West." Go back far enough, and we do meet.

If you are Hindu, I doubt you equate deva with faerie. Yet, if we strip back the cultural language and get to the essential philosophical concepts needed to describe the many levels of reality, we find a meeting of the minds.

One of my intentions is to get to know the nature spirits in my area, specifically on my property.

After the pond war settled down, I reached out to the spirit of the pond through inner journey work, which involves altering your state of consciousness through sound and breath and reaching out to other-than-human beings. Surprisingly, I discovered the pond was not troubled by what had happened. Instead, it was just one more change in thousands of years of evolution it had experienced. So, in contrast to my turmoil, agitation, and grief, the pond was serene, resilient, and unaffected.

That encounter happened a few years ago and changed my entire perspective on what I was dealing with. My continued exploration of local nature spirits progressed cautiously and slowly.

Yesterday I journeyed inward, reached out again to the land and pond, and learned some exciting things which are very illuminating. First, the pond is a lower-level deva/nature spirit, a water elemental. My impression is that it is rather stoic and low energy, in contrast to another water elemental in my area that I know by its Algonquin name Memegwesi. This small water spirit inhabits waterfalls or riverbanks. It is benign, but sometimes blows canoes astray or steals things when not shown proper respect. Memegwesi is lively, playful, mischievous, and full of kinetic energy.

The second thing I learned was the differentiation between the pond spirit and the higher-level wetland spirit, which qualifies as a deva in the most complete sense of the word. I discovered her name is Alva, and I experienced this subtle energy as part of the feminine principle. However, I didn't know what Alva meant, so I immediately researched and found this...

älva - A human-like creature from Swedish mythology similar to an elf or fairy. She is often a beautiful young female, and one can sometimes see her dancing in the mist.

My ancestry is partly Swedish; my great-grandmother, Margaretha, was Swedish, and I sensed this deva as a feminine presence. So it made sense that this deva would reveal itself to me in this way.

Water Elemental, mixed media collage, Jan Blencowe©2019

The second reason for a recent uplevel in my work with nature spirits and deva is because of a book. It's too early to recommend it because I'm only a few chapters in. Still, it already offered me something I lacked—a more serious approach and underpinning for deva and nature spirits.

I quote the book above, Deva: Our Relationship with the Subtle World, by Jacquelyn E. Lane. I like that Lane takes a serious approach and lays out the realities of the subtle world in clear, logical precision regarding energy. In the past, I've experienced authors, presenters, and self-styled experts on nature spirits, deva, faeries, etc., who come across as sincere but rather silly.

Lane's diagrams and illustrations of the layers of the various worlds, distinguished by density, dovetail nicely with my current study of the Tree of Like in the Kabbalah. Kaballah is serious philosophical material. The Tree of Life contains four worlds, ten sefirot or numerical emanations, and twenty-two paths that connect the Divine with our material world and, conversely, our material world with the Divine.

Exploring the worlds above/beyond our physical reality is particularly interesting to me. But it's not nonsense or new-age nuttery; it's a deeply philosophical, cosmological, and intellectual attempt to understand reality.

Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism at its finest, and nature spirits as part of a greater reality, and our ability to engage with them is attested to by some of my most respected pagan friends.

My Protestant background, which relies heavily on the intellectual and the literal and far less on the symbolic or metaphorical, is no help here. Other than a tacit acknowledgment that angels and out-of-body trips to the seventh heaven by Ezekiel and Paul are mentioned in the Bible, no exploration or understanding of spiritual realms is ever undertaken. But Kabbalah and Deva fill that gap.

I like the hierarchy of Divine > Archetype > Overlighting Deva + Angelic Architects of Form > Nature Spirits + Transitional Elementals > Lower Elementals. I resonate with this schematic (Lane’s bottom three and my addition of Divine and Archetype above) because it explains the relationship between worlds of varying energetic density (only one of which we perceive with our five senses), which panpsychism informs us have a consciousness or soul appropriate for what it is and which we can perceive through our other more subtle senses, especially if we cultivate them.

By some gift of fortune, I made a wise choice when I was six. I chose to remain open to all realms of reality. That choice has given me a lifetime of enriching mind and soul-expanding experiences. It has allowed me to find spiritual insights and a powerful understanding of our world and the greater reality we inhabit.

Some of you have experienced the same; others have only in later years or through a crisis of some kind come face to face with the reality of subtle energy and the other realms.

Sometimes conventional or limiting beliefs have to topple, and we have to take a leap of faith into new ways of thinking and experiencing consciousness to grasp what is real and reap the benefits of making room for a new vision of how we see reality.

This has been part of my journey, and I'm curious about yours. What do you think about nature spirits and deva? What have you experienced? The comments section is our place for sharing our stories and inspiring discussion around fascinating spiritual ideas.

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